[MGSA-L] Efterpi Mitsi on REPRESENTATIONS OF GREECE IN EARLY ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING, 4/14., 7:30 p.m.

[Evangelos Calotychos]

The Modern Greek Seminar
at the University Seminars Program
&
The Programs in Hellenic Studies
at
Columbia University
&
New York University

invite you to a lecture by

EFTERPI MITSI
(Associate Professor, Faculty of English Studies,
National & Capodistrian University of Athens, Greece)

REPRESENTATIONS OF GREECE IN EARLY ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING

On Thursday, April 14th
At 7:30 p.m., Hamilton Hall 603

Abstract:
Focusing on the accounts of two early travelers to Greece, Thomas Dallam
and William Lithgow, I explore the first encounters between British
travelers and the Greek people, who lived under Ottoman or Venetian
subjugation in the same area known since antiquity. Both Dallam's  
journey
through Greece to Constantinople in 1599 and Lithgow's in 1609 resulted
from a new economic and political balance between East and West; the  
naval
battle of Lepanto (1571) broke the spell of  Ottoman supremacy in the
Mediterranean and allowed England to establish the Levant company, whose
goal was not only trading but also enlisting Ottoman sympathies against
Spain. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the organ-maker and  
musician
Thomas Dallam and the Scot ?poet? and professional traveler William
Lithgow narrate their adventures in Greece, constructing the persona  
of a
suffering yet resilient male Protestant abroad, in two lively yet very
different travel accounts. Both travelers display a limited or distorted
knowledge of  Greece, often not "seeing" the places they visit but
documenting their exploits and misfortunes. Despite differences in
profession, education and ethnographic literacy, they are also both
interested in encounters with the Greeks, commenting on their character,
appearance, and customs. The juxtaposition of the two texts, the first  
by
a roguish artisan and the second by a splenetic scholar, reveals
contradictory perceptions of the other culture, either informed by the
knowledge of the Greeks' past or infused by curiosity and surprise at
unexpected acts of hospitality by hosts, dragomans and guides.
Intercultural attitudes and relations center on the travelers' gendered
metaphors of the region and suggest a projection of Greece on its women,
viewed as alluring and dangerous at the same time. Although Greece is
feminized, evoking a representation of the Orient as a fantasy based on
sexual difference, it would be anachronistic to call Dallam and  
Lithgow's
discourses and practices orientalist or colonialist. Written at the time
when the Ottoman Empire was the greatest threat to European Christendom,
still colonizing European territory, these texts enact fears of capture,
conversion and disempowerment. My reading of Dallam and Lithgow's Greek
journey emphasizes the intriguing contradictions which unsettle the neat
East/West divide, especially in Greece, whose ambiguity is both
geographical (at the threshold between East and West) and cultural (its
noble past against its ignoble present).


EFTERPI MITSI is an Associate Professor in English Literature and  
Culture
at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She holds a PhD  
in
Comparative Literature from New York University and has been a  
lecturer in
English Literature at the University of Cyprus. She is currently the
Director of the Postgraduate Studies Program at the Faculty of English
Studies and the President of the Hellenic Society for the Study of  
English
(HASE). She also teaches at the interdepartmental postgraduate  
programs in
Lexicography and in Translation Studies at the University of Athens. Her
research interests are in the fields of early modern literature and  
travel
literature, especially travel writing on Greece. Recent publications
include essays on Sandys, Gosson, Marlowe, Sidney, More, early modern
travel and on British travelers to Greece in journals such as English,
Studies in Travel Writing, Classical and Modern Literature, Restoration,
Literature Compass, Early Modern Literary Studies, Mosaic, and in edited
volumes, the volume Women Writing Greece: Essays in Hellenism,  
Orientalism
and Travel  (Rodopi, 2008) and a collection of women's travel writing on
Greece, In The Country of the Moon: British Women Travelers to Greece
1718-1932 (Estia, 2005), both with Vassiliki Kolocotroni. In the context
of the Lexicography program she has published a Glossary of Feminist
Theory and the volume Lexicography and Ideology.

______________________________________
Vangelis Calotychos
Associate Professor, Program in Hellenic Studies
Department of Classics
Columbia University
606 Hamilton Hall,
1130 Amsterdam Avenue,
New York, NY 10027
Tel:  212-854-6988
Fax: 212-854-7856
ec2268 at columbia.edu

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